The principle
In the Namur area of Belgium, five separate hospitals have set up collaboration processes thanks to the transfer of medical images. This information sharing and these remote partnerships are possible because the hospital departments are equipped with the TM-Community feature of Telemis-Medical: a solution that provides many benefits to the sites that are connected to it.
The sharing of medical infrastructure amongst many medical sites is one of the most striking advantages: for example, MRI images taken at the Mont-Godinne Dinant hospital can be sent to the St-Luc clinic in Bouge, and PET scan images can be sent from the same site to the Sainte-Elisabeth clinic in Namur, St-Luc in Bouge, or indeed the “Wallonie picarde Hospital” in Tournai. This sharing also supports the medical skills of specialists, who can easily call on the experience and opinion of colleagues by sharing images. TM-Community also promotes improved communication in clinical studies.
What does this mean in practice?
In practice, the site where the investigation is carried out decides to send the patient file, one or more exams, or just a set of images, to the PACS of another site. So it's not a case of the remote site going fishing in the local PACS. This procedure complies with privacy rules.
And beyond the technology?
Following a request for collaboration between two sites, an agreement is drafted, covering the exchange of images and patient data between the hospitals. This agreement must be approved by the medical council and the ethics committees of both sites. According to Hubert Meurisse, leader of the PACS project at the Mont Godinne Dinant Hospital, "The partnership with Telemis has allowed us to make the most of 'telemedicine' technologies and has made a major contribution to reaching our filmless and paperless targets, whilst truly adding value to patient diagnosis and medical monitoring."

Louvain-la-Neuve, 15th June 2015 - Telemis, specialised in PACS - ‘Picture Archiving & Communication Systems’ solutions for hospitals and imaging centers obtained the ISO 9001 & ISO 13485 certification for its headquarters as well as for its three subsidiaries located in Toulouse (France), Torino (Italy) and Neuchatel (Switzerland).
Even though the ISO certification is a voluntary process, it consists nevertheless of a thorough examination of all procedures which should be respected by the company so as to ensure the quality of services and products provided. The headquarters based in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium) werealready ISO certified. The renewal extended its verification process to all subsidiaries of the group.
“The pillars of Telemis being innovation, integration & involvement, this procedure highlights and enhances the “involvement” pillar, so as to guarantee the best service to all clients’ says Stephane Ketelaer, CEO of the group.
The ISO 13485:2003 requirements are specific to companies providing medical devices. In addition to that, the ISO 9001:2008, quality system management relates to improving clients’ satisfaction by setting up continuous improvement procedures.

In the city of Turin, in north-western Italy, Ospedale Oftalmico Sperino is a public hospital specialising in the treatment of eye diseases. The hospital is the Piedmont regional centre of expertise in paediatric ophthalmology, plastic and reconstructive ophthalmology, traumatology, glaucoma, and diseases of the cornea. It also houses the university ophthalmological clinic. The hospital has had a Telemis PACS system to serve the needs of its radiology department for several years, but more recently it wanted to extend its medical image archiving system to the other hospital's units.
What has this meant in practice?
Patient identity management is an important aspect of a MACS (Multimedia Archiving Communication System) installation: the information system and biomedical teams and Telemis Project Managers work together to extend the worklist concept to cover the whole hospital, beyond radiology.
The Telemis teams are working with the medical teams to conduct a complete inventory of non-radiology modalities and evaluate their connection capacities. This involves determining the priorities of each department and progressing towards an integrated operational system in every part of the hospital.
Aside from technical monitoring, training users to look up and send images will account for a significant proportion of the budget. User training will guarantee the highest possible satisfaction level thanks to the all-inclusive approach of the Telemis MACS: unlimited on-site training sessions and configurations is the best possible guarantee of the customer's ultimate satisfaction!
For what purpose?
Ospedale Oftalmico Sperino has several goals:
To improve the quality of monitoring by providing an extended patient image archive to all departments in the hospital;
To optimise and reuse the initial investment in the radiology department to serve the needs of the hospital's whole medical community and to favour the sharing of patient information;
To contribute to scientific research thanks to the activation of knowledge-based database systems.
“With the installation of the MACS solution, Oftalmico hospital is moving towards a paperless environment in all departments. The initiative started with the installation of the PACS as the sole primary archive for radiology imaging. This networked solution offers a centralised repository for all documents and studies for every patient, and will provide more interaction between departments and increase the quality of clinical monitoring,” says Dr Sardi, Director of Oftalmico.